This paper investigates the mobilisation of the Hungarian Red Army in 1919 by the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. It challenges the literature's existing interpretations, explaining the successful mobilisation of the regime with its ‘nationalist’ or ‘Bolshevik’ character. First, the paper examines the military policy of the regime, arguing that it was not a mere copy of the Russian communist model but was a unique combination of social-democratic and communist ideas. Second, it analyses the recruitment propaganda and demonstrates how it combined dogmatic Bolshevism with traditional elements of the wartime propaganda. Third, it investigates the methods used by the Hungarian Soviet Republic to mobilise the population both in Budapest and in the rural eastern countryside. It argues that the mobilisation was possible through the involvement of civil associations (mostly the trade unions) and the incorporation of the former Habsburg regiments in the new Red Army.

During the 1960s, development aid helped West Germany project a benign image while it discouraged diplomatic recognition of East Germany. In Ghana, however, this effort clashed with the Pan-Africanist aims of President Kwame Nkrumah. Four periodicals under his control attacked West Germany as neo-colonialist, militarist, racist, latently Nazi and a danger to world peace. West German officials resented this campaign and tried to make it stop, but none of their tactics, not even vague threats to aid, worked for long. The attacks ended with Nkrumah's overthrow in early 1966, but while they lasted, they demonstrated that a small state receiving aid could use the press to invert its asymmetric political relationship with the donor.

In the early 1960s, the US President's Commission on the Status of Women analysed Swedish gender policies with an interest in securing social and economic justice for American women. This largely overlooked investigation ultimately led to the integration of Swedish policy goals and strategies into the commission's recommendations, extending the impact of a Swedish model beyond mere rhetorical functions. This case indicates how, in the context of Cold War bipolarisation, transnational labour networks facilitated ‘modellisation’ by bolstering the trendiness of Swedish examples and the receptivity of American actors. Crucial was Esther Peterson of the US Women's Bureau, who served as a proselytiser of Swedish ideas, thereby driving a spontaneous and highly contingent translation of these policies into US-compatible proposals. The role of Peterson suggests a need for a greater recognition of the agendas of specific interest groups when historicising the creation and international circulation of a Swedish model.

This article traces one aspect of Britain's approach to the political economy of energy conservation. It focuses on the forecasting work of Royal Dutch Shell and the deliberations of the Heath government. In the late 1960s, the oil major Shell predicted that oil-producing states would impose an embargo on oil-consuming states. Energy conservation policies would be necessary. In tracing the reception of Shell's ‘crisis’ scenario and its proposed resolution, this article details how these ideas were received by Edward Heath's Conservative government, particularly its ‘think-tank’, the Central Policy Review Staff. In the short term, interventionist policies were proposed so as to demonstrate Britain's ability to operate without ever-increasing oil consumption, while in the long term the idea was that the energy-saving capacities of a freely-operating market could address the problem. The article recounts the confusion these proposed conservation policies provoked, and how the second idea gradually coalesced and ultimately outlasted the Heath government, providing one justification for the eventual privatisation of Britain's formerly nationalised energy industries.

Drawing on government documents as well as the papers of renewable energy advocates, this article looks at debates over alternative energy in West Germany during the 1980s. It shows that because West Germany's monopolistic electricity market was dominated by utilities companies reticent to invest in alternatives, struggles over access to the electric grid and the rates independent producers received for their electricity were essential to efforts to add renewables into the German energy mix after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The legislated ‘feed-in tariff’ for electricity generated by individuals from renewable sources, which emerged from these debates in 1990, cemented the idea that individual Germans, not utilities or the state, were responsible for the fate of renewable energy in Germany and paved the way towards an ‘economically viable’ renewables sector.

This article focuses on the most renowned smuggling case concerning Polish athletes during the Polish People's Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa; PRL). In the early 1970s, several Polish football and basketball players were caught smuggling dollars out of Poland and importing gold into the country for profit. The article discusses the roles states devised for athletes in the countries of real socialism and how athletes attempted to assert agency within these confines. It draws on work by Robert Edelman and Sylvain Dufraisse to show how athletes often did not behave in the way Eastern bloc states wished them to.

As in many other countries, Spanish society also underwent its own ’68. In response, the Franco regime increased repression: it became much harsher, and much broader. After that, opposition to state brutality became the anti-Franco movement's main cause and a unifying element for its many different actors. This is the process addressed by this article. Specifically, it aims to explore how repression facilitated the encounters between activists coming from different social movements and political organisations. At the same time, it tries to show the importance of diversifying the analyses on the long ’68 – focusing on different countries, regions and cities – in order to grasp its transnational nature.

Despite considerable scholarly and popular interest in the International Brigades, which fought on the side of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, traditional approaches centred on ‘national’ contingents of foreign volunteers have left significant gaps in historical knowledge. In particular, relations between the foreign volunteers and their Spanish hosts have received little attention, even though these relationships were fundamental to the everyday experience of volunteering, as well as affecting the International Brigades’ cohesion during their time in Spain. This account introduces a range of new archival material relating to the English-speaking XV International Brigade, arguing that pervasive structural and cultural factors led to a complex and variable set of outcomes that defy binary categorisation. In doing so, this study contributes to an emerging new literature on transnational approaches to the Spanish Civil War and interwar anti-fascisms, as well as comparative approaches to foreign fighter mobilisations.

There were major guidelines in the application of Greek transitional justice in 1974–5. Trials connected with politics had often taken place in Greece: in 1922, 1935 and during the civil war in the 1940s. Justice had often been instrumentalised during previous internal conflicts, mortgaging both the interwar republic and the post-war democracy. The 1974–5 transition followed a different path. According to the internal documents of the Greek government, there was constant care to uphold the rule of law and conform to the emerging international standards concerning human rights. This was seen as a necessary precondition for the establishment of a modern European democracy.

From the World2 and World3 models to contemporary Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that model carbon neutral emission pathways, global computer models have served as virtual laboratories for addressing economic, environmental and technological concerns together. Representing technological change has been a controversial element of global modelling efforts because, to a great extent, it sets the parameters on conceivable futures. To retrace this history, this article analyses four moments when modellers debated technological change: the controversy spurred by The Limits to Growth in the 1970s; subsequent global future studies during that decade; the IIASA Energy in a Finite World study in the 1980s; and the shift to endogenous technological change in IAMs in the 2000s. It shows that the notion of technological change as a predictable parameter affecting the future of society was not a given. Technological change progressively became a parameter in models as more elaborate methodologies were developed to simulate it. When modellers began to focus on climate action in the 1990s and 2000s, their interest in the relationship between technological change and social change dwindled. The increasing skill with which modellers formally represented technological dynamics was commensurate to the decline of heated discussions over how conflicting worldviews shaped simulations.

The paper focuses on the ideological roots of the prison saints movement in contemporary Romania. The text uncovers the interwar and communist conceptual premises upon which the biographies of fascist martyrs for canonisation as saints by the Romanian Orthodox Church were shaped. As martyrs for the Christian faith, those deceased were depicted as respectable figures, showcasing their martyrdom on the same moral footing as the dissidents of former democratic parties opposing communism. Furthermore, the narrative strategies in shaping a fascist hagiography from the interwar up to the post-communist years stand as another critical issue for the present article.

This article examines the role of emotions in papal discourse about European integration. Expanding on the ‘emotional turn’ in history, it develops an analytic framework to study emotional valence in constructing the past and future. Analysing Pope Pius XII's three major post-war encyclicals (Communium Interpretes Dolorum, Fulgens Radiatur and Summi Maeroris), this article shows how the emotional vocabulary of Pius XII bridges the gap between theology and politics. In particular, it illuminates how Pope Pius XII integrated emotional and religious vocabulary to (re)construct an image of a European past and future.

Neoliberal and conservative actors, financed by the fossil fuel industry, have been identified as crucial parts of a climate change denialist counter movement since at least the 1980s. We claim that this intersection stems from more than just vested interest fuelling advocacy groups. By focusing on the intellectual developments and social networks of core actors in the environmental debate in Sweden, we trace the history of opposition to environmental regulation in a country proclaiming to be an environmental pioneer. Our analysis shows that while the framing of climate change in terms of complexity initially provided actors with arguments for neoliberal policies, the obstruction of climate and environmental action was steeped in a neoliberal thought style. Our findings demonstrate the importance of scrutinising economic paradigms and thought styles that has enabled the delay of climate policy as well as the continued need for historical and geographically specific studies of obstruction.

Surprisingly, sexuality has not been at the centre of scholarship on post-war Central and Eastern Europe. While neighbouring topics, such as gender or everyday life, have been thoroughly and wonderfully researched (the list here is too long, but let me mention at least some shining examples), sexuality somehow escaped the spotlight. Path-breaking research done by Dagmar Herzog on East Germany or Dan Healey on Soviet Russia was for a long time not followed by similar examinations focusing on other countries from the region. The situation is beginning to change.

The Portuguese constitution, passed in April 1976, considered the nationalisations undertaken after the Carnation Revolution to be ‘irreversible’, prescribing a development model based on state planning. Changes made to the constitutional text, in 1989, allowed for a privatisation programme that curtailed government intervention and reinforced market provision. This mirrored a previous shift in the public sphere. Whereas political debate in 1976 was mostly centred on state-led development models, the next decade witnessed the rise of a pro-market approach. Two crises of the balance of payments encouraged a growing number of economists, businessmen, journalists and politicians to argue for the need to revise the constitution, enhancing the role and scope of markets. This article focuses on the rise of a neoliberal intellectual field in Portugal between 1976 and 1989, analysing its efforts to overcome the legacy of the Carnation Revolution and build a competitive market order in a semiperipheral context.

Though not the forefathers of the Green party family, the Finnish Greens are an avantgarde when it comes to adapting to existing political culture and making their way from political margins to mainstream. The examination of the intra-party reasons and reasonings regarding adaptation and conformation reveals that it is never a question of either/or but a testament of conflicting interests. Although the compromise and consensus-seeking Finnish political culture and party system created external pressures on the Green League, forcing the party to conform with the existing procedures and traditions, the growing intra-party willingness to adapt was expressed in streamlining of the organisation and ideology as well as in the increasing office-seeking tendencies and accentuation of stability and credibility as preconditions of incumbency. Instead of pursuing radical changes to the existing political system, transforming growing adherence into incumbency required adaptation and conformation

The publication of Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain in the mid-1990s transformed the field of Soviet studies. He presented Soviet socialism as a civilisation born of the Enlightenment, inspired by science's ability to sculpt society, and driven by the pursuit of an alternative to capitalism. His phrase ‘speaking Bolshevik’ spawned productive debate, as did his use of the Foucauldian paradigm. In something akin to a clarion call for urbanists, he proposed the socialist city as a metonym for this new Soviet world: Soviet socialism, he noted, was inherently industrial. Authorities regarded the city as a hallmark of socialist modernity, an endpoint and changing ideal toward which to strive, all of which makes the city a fruitful centre of investigation.

In 2012 the historian Julia Adeney Thomas restrained her temper but unleashed a warning. The occasion was a forum in the American Historical Review on ‘historiographic “turns” in critical perspective’. The perspectives offered were critical enough, Thomas wrote in praise of the other authors, but the forum had a blind spot: ‘alongside the turns analyzed here, a world-altering force has been emerging, one larger, more devastating, and more definitive even than “contemporary flexible forms of capitalism”: I speak of climate change – or climate collapse – and all of its related global transformations’. Since then, some intersectional scholars have gone beyond that to argue that climate collapse and racial capitalism are not separate topics at all, but are bound together by white supremacy and lingering forms of European imperialism. Over the past decade some environmental historians have grappled with these connections and deployed new frameworks for thinking about scale, the interdependence of the local and the global, the implications of a Euro-centric analytical framework for our understanding of the world and the relationship between economic systems and environmental change. Although they have developed separately, both environmental history and global history have called upon historians of Europe to rethink boundary making in their methodologies and in their categories of analysis. In an era of global climate catastrophe, global pandemic and global economic crisis, where does the ‘European’ environment end?

Why write people's histories in our age of populism? Much of the original appeal of the genre derived from the marginality its subject once occupied in public life. Ordinary lives were hardly mentioned in school textbooks; popular culture was assigned to the bottom of the nation's hierarchy of values; and popular politics was either criminalised or disciplined to fit national voting patterns in states ruled by bullet and ballot alike. Defining the people naturally set the fault lines between liberal, conservative and socialist practitioners of the genre. J.R. Green's late nineteenth-century prototype – A Short History of the English People – presented a liberal story of social change, from the landing of Hengist to the battle of Waterloo. It incorporated the entirety of social life mushrooming beneath the deeds of kings, in all its evolutionary splendor. On the continent, notably in Central and Eastern Europe, the people would often feature in ethnic garb, in histories of national liberation or imperial projection. Yet it was Marxism, broadly conceived, that provided the most enduring template for people's histories, at least in the Anglosphere, from A.L. Morton's pioneering A People's History of England onwards. Extended beyond strictly national boundaries to topics such as modern Europe or even the world, two recent people's histories written in this vein, both taking their motto from Brecht's Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters, filter their subject through class struggle and offer a narrative of freedom from want in which a vast labouring multitude toils, suffers and rebels across ages. However, political outlook and epistemological commitments aside, for the past century people's history has claimed to restore to the people its own past, often one of misery at the hands of elites yet one all the more dignified for that reason. Do any of these coordinates still obtain today? Is not the current glorification of ordinary lives, popular culture and politics the bread and butter of populism?

Few European countries have gone through as much as Poland during the twentieth century. Even among the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which during the ‘Age of Extremes’ experienced the substantial losses and movement of tens of millions of people, Poland's history is somewhat unique, as most of these expulsions affected the Polish border regions. Although not the only culprit, one can make a strong case that the border changes were a primary factor, having – for better or worse – a strong effect on the economy, the society and the general development of Poland. Poland has, nevertheless, been economically successful since the 1990s. It is thus with good reason that two questions have played a major role in the historiography of economic and social trends in twentieth-century Poland. The first one was whether the ‘border changes’ were a burden, or if Poland was able to profit from them. The second question asks whether Poland was able to modernise because of them. At the same time, few authors recognised that both issues are closely intertwined. Emphasising their interconnection is the main purpose of this review.